#AITour2019 – Mumbai | AZ-INDIA | Dear Azure on the roll!

When I started of with Dear Azure keeping an objective to provide cinch learning path for learning Microsoft Azure in Feb 2018, one of my goals was to organize an event in the way I always wanted an event to happen , for Azure learners .

After organizing 25 webinars in three months, on 05th January 2019, the day finally arrived to witness the first technical event of year 2019 – #AITour2019. The event targeted learning AI with Azure services & products.

As famously quoted, “Its simple to be difficult, but its very difficult to be Simple”, so I decided to take up this difficult challenge to make learning AI with Azure as simple as possible. And hence, #AITour2019 – Simplifying Intelligence…!

What would have been a better venue for Dear Azure than Microsoft Office – Mumbai . All sincere thanks to Deepak Rajendran and Gayathri.

Event was kicked off with a brief introduction about the topics to be covered during the day. And the best and most awaited part started by a keynote delivery by Noelle LaCharite, remotely, the first of its kind. Noelle, leads developer experience for Applied AI at Microsoft. The session was held online presented to full packed room of audience. It covered various aspects of AI, with ease of learning and provided code base for developers. She also presented handful demos of few cognitive services which gave attendees an energetic kick-start for the event. The session went on for about 30 minutes and was concluded with a thundering applause.

You can watch the recorded keynote session, and do subscribe the channel.

After this rejuvenating keynote, I started with an introduction session for attendees present in the meeting room. Was glad to see a diverse audience from engineering student to AGMs, Solution Architects, & Technical Specialist from well-known MNCs , who were eager to learn more about AI.

Vinay Argekar from BPB publications, the event sponsor had a quick talk with audience about the publication. Their upcoming plans of publishing Azure related books, along with existing set of Technical book collection. Attendees were pleased to have the presentation about BPB online.

Thought of changing a trend, by not providing the day’s agenda, and for keeping audience excited about next session, giving a quick introduction about AZ-INDIA community managed by Dear Azure, and what is Dear Azure all about, I requested the next speaker, Abdul Rasheed Feroz Khan, Microsoft Azure MVP, to take over. With his amazing presentation skills, he filled further excitement in attendees. Covering from scratch of cloud computing to Dockers, he explained how the things evolved and how AI will now play a role in upcoming Cloud offerings, here in Microsoft Azure.

Next came in Adwait Churi, technical architect from Hexaware Technologies. Adwait presented the attendees with actual AI implementation case studies, with challenges and solutions he and his team faced while implementing the same, and how ease it was to use MS Azure cognitive offerings to deal with real time business problem statements.

Session concluded by many interesting questions poured by attendees and followed by delicious lunch.

Immediately after lunch, we started with AI with Azure serverless – Azure Functions. Session was presented by Akshay Deshmukh, an Author, Blogger, C # Corner MVP. Akshay kept the attendees active with presenting live coding and demo of implementing AI Cognitive services with Azure functions. One of the best demo that could ever be presented live!

Next session was presented by Vikram Patil, Sr. Integration expert & IPaaS specialist from Toronto, Canada. Vikram, deep dived attendees with what Integration is all about. How Azure offerings help with Integrations, and how AI can be infused in these Azure Integration services.

To make the session more excited, we decided to use Azure Logic Apps with Text Analytics service, to manage event Tweets. Attendees were sharing their experience on twitter with respect to event, and our logic app flow was monitoring these tweets, and the one passing the cognitive test, was posted to Dear Azure LinkedIn page.

We also kept a special prize for the active Twitterati! Manoj Dube, EPI Server developer from HCL won this prize.

This live implementation Use-case was highly appreciated by most of the attendees and over social media audience too.

Next, came in, Kishore Chowdary, Lead Associate at CodeSizzler, with one of the most awaited topic, AI with Azure IoT. Kishore explained the ease of using AI cognitive services along with Azure IoT presenting live demo. Attendees were stunned to experience this highly shouted word Internet of Things in tech world hand to hand with Azure cognitive offerings.

Next, came in, Kishore Chowdary, Lead Associate at CodeSizzler, with one of the most awaited topic, AI with Azure IoT. Kishore explained the ease of using AI cognitive services along with Azure IoT presenting live demo. Attendees were stunned to experience this highly shouted word Internet of Things in tech world hand to hand with Azure cognitive offerings.

Finally Token of appreciations was presented to all Speakers. To my surprise, I was honored by the title ‘Community Hero’ from CodeSizzler.

All the attendees were presented with Dear Azure AZ-INDIA tshirts, Dear Azure Laptop Stickers and Certificate of participation.

To Summarize, 65 attendees from 37 Organizations including, big four companies and many MNCs attended the 10 hours long learning session. The event left them not only with excitement to learn Artificial Intelligence but also gave them the zeal to implement and experiment the same.

The tour started from Mumbai, and is also planned for Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gurgaon. Will keep everyone posted about the dates.

Feedback received from attendees was delightful and enlightening, and feedback will surely be incorporated in future sessions.

I take this opportunity to thank you for the wonderful experience of Dear Azure’s event AITour2019 at Microsoft Office, Mumbai. It was one of the best experience I had; Kasam has managed the event with surprise session one after other, great idea, not to sharing event agenda in that start of the event. Presenter have shared valuable very useful informative session regards AI/Cognitive services/IOT/ Serverless & Cloud concepts !! Appreciate sponsor also BPB publication nice talk with Vinay, CodeSizzler team. Rukhsar Ahmad– Senior Technical Specialist – GEP Worldwide

I thank to ALMIGHTY for making our attempt to help AI and Azure community was highly appreciated from across the globe and helped techies to upgrade skills with most trending topic in race, AI

Once again my heartfelt thanks to each and everyone of you who made this event a huge success. Let me assure you all that it’s just a beginning and more is yet to come. Hang tight!